Green Pass yet another bureaucratic nightmare: the pandemic and Kafka Castle
The debate on the extension of the Green Pass , on the French model, to a whole series of additional services and activities compared to those for which it is already effective today, has forgotten an aspect on which it would be worthwhile to dwell: that of the structural, chaotic, Kafkaesque bureaucratic complications that have always plagued Italy, and that we can bet would end up or will end up enveloping, like a shroud, the implementation tools (checks, verifications, data collection) of this institute.
And if it is clearly logical and understandable that the first implications to be put on the metaphorical table of the debate are those of a constitutional nature, balancing, evaluating and reconciling distinct rights and interests at stake, it cannot be ignored from a reflection on the real possibilities of success. of an instrument that would in any case imply an almost perfect, capillary, well-run and above all modern machine.
Italy is that country in which for decades the disconsolate mantra of administrative and legislative simplifications has been reiterated, the generalized idea of a drastic, draconian cut to the flow and stock of laws and administrative obligations that weigh on citizens and businesses and that bind us since we were born and that accompany us to the grave. From the cradle to the grave , as they say in the Anglo-Saxon countries.
We are still today the country of Flaiano who wrote in “Nocturnal Diary” “they present to him the project for streamlining the bureaucracy. Warmly thanks. He regrets the absence of form H. He concludes that he will pass the project, for prompt examination, to the competent office, which is being created ” .
A country whose citizens discover, perhaps by going to the bank or withdrawing their pension statement, that they have died due to a bureaucratic misprint or a simple digital dysfunction, the country where the certified card prevails over meat, biology and logic , and in which employees listless but firm in their determination to oppose rationality even when they face it they will deny your being alive.
The country where, despite dematerialization, self-certification, digitization, the archives overflow with yellowed papers, authentic libraries of Babylon in which the human being is dissected by a bureaucratic demiurge without any form of empathy.
Fantozziani in our masochistic impulse to make life, everyday life, even feelings and emotions, a fragmentary set of boxes to be signed, stamped, stamped and then deposited in some box nibbled by moths.
Distinguished administrativists, from Aldo Travi to Elio Casetta, have demonstrated the complication of simplifying, and despite the symbolic scenes of the burning of laws broadcast in recent years we are always at the starting point: because, and it is this cultural, anthropological factor, we we love stamped papers, we take refuge behind and within them, to be judged in the assumption of responsibility.
We live through an intermediary person, or rather, through a stamp: phrases such as 'it is not within my competence', 'it takes the time it takes', the bureaucratic-Zen mantra of 'it has always been done this way' – autopoietic and deadly in its customary reiteration of Marquis errors which, being replicated according to the bureaucratic mentality, would cease to be errors – they represent the Bible and the summa of the very way of being in the world of the bureaucratic class, and all in all of all of us Italians.
Because if it is true that we curse the bureaucrat and the dullness of certain procedures, the dullness of certain prison architecture that connote ministries and municipalities, in the end we too are flesh of the flesh, blood of the blood of that same culture: we too end up in the Court of Cassation for a fine for a double row or for a dripping of water from the balcony of the upstairs tenant, we too use the complication to make life impossible for those who do not like us. The endemic litigation, the desire to say 'I cheated it', structurally lead to the complication, to the catch that is hidden in the folds of a stormy ocean of codes, paragraphs and regulations. A monster that feeds itself continuously.
So let's imagine the effective functioning of the Green Pass extended to an ever-increasing number of activities: the measure would require a capillary, organic series of controls and verifications, in some cases decentralized by the same operators or service owners, as it has recently recognized the Privacy Guarantor.
The owner of a gym, for example, would be called to a supervisory surplus, however with non-trivial problems in terms of the effective exercise of the power of verification: as long as, in fact, it is the State that determines the power of verification, putting it in the hands of the authorities. public, I am thinking of the staff of the Railways and the Railway Police when it comes to travel tickets, the problem arises to a certain lesser extent and only the constitutional objections remain standing on which we dispute and debate, but when instead the control should end up on the shoulders of the private one wonders how it could really happen.
The Italian who is generally not even more respectful of the uniform or of the public authority, do you really believe that he accepts to be reproached, metaphorically, by a private operator?
There have already been little comforting precedents in this sense, when restaurateurs and bartenders came in fact, surreptitiously, made responsible for controlling their users, contingent on inputs, checking compliance with social distancing measures and that no gatherings were created: no one has ever explained nor has it ever been understood what the actual and real powers of a bar operator were, and to tell the truth the most plausible answer seems to be 'zero'.
Probably they should have warned the police, and not acted in the first person, but we are in the field of the unexpressed, of the possibility, of the opacity of rules more designed to safeguard those who were drafting them rather than public health.
Does anyone remember the tragicomic figure of 'civic assistants'? It was rightly mocked but also just the fact that it was conceived and communicated by a then minister, without ever having clarified which functions, attributions and by virtue of which powers they could operate, says a lot about the bureaucratic-sloganistic approach that connotes this Country.
Even when we finish talking about the digital and technological approach, I would like to recall the very unfortunate case of Immuni and tracking: Immuni was not a victim of conspiracies or eternal privacy, now seen as a sort of brake on everything, but simply the lack of bureaucratic coordination between the center and the periphery, with sparse and scarce communications between the ASL, the Regions and the Ministry.
What can lead us to think that the dysfunctions already experienced, albeit in other aspects and sectors, would not end up replicating on the Green Pass side?
To be sure, the dysfunctions are already occurring. Both former Covid positives and single dose vaccinated people know this well, for various reasons, such as the emergence of pregnancy for women or being cured of Covid in a period of time not indicated to receive both doses, have not yet been able to take the second dose and are unable to obtain clarifications on how and when to receive the Green Pass .
The phone calls to the toll-free number, for many people stopped at a dose, have turned into a real Kafkaesque ordeal, into a grim hide and seek game. Poor functionality of the service, poor linearity and poor clarity of decision-making processes.
The feeling, and it is a feeling that has been going on for an abundant year, ever since that Amazonian tangle of Dpcm, decrees-laws, regulations, circulars, notes that all together constitute the regulatory framework to combat the pandemic, is that the bureaucratic surplus , expanding more and more, it becomes useless on the side of concrete effectiveness, having as its only function that of de-responsibility of the decision-makers, who can hide behind the copious adoption of measures to say 'we have done something, if it does not work the fault lies with irresponsibility of citizens'.
Sound familiar to you? This is what really happened, and a quick rundown of the headlines of the past few months bears witness to it in a crystalline way.
That the measures in question are completely complicated, bizarre or impracticable seems to be of interest to very few.
A tool like the Green Pass , even more so if in extended form, requires, without discounts, an administrative machine calibrated in an almost perfect, efficient, punctual, precise way. And, without wanting to be defeatists, this does not seem to be the case with Italy and its public administration.
The post Green Pass yet another bureaucratic nightmare: the pandemic and Kafka's Castle appeared first on Atlantico Quotidiano .
This is a machine translation from Italian language of a post published on Atlantico Quotidiano at the URL http://www.atlanticoquotidiano.it/quotidiano/green-pass-ennesimo-incubo-burocratico-la-pandemia-e-il-castello-di-kafka/ on Tue, 20 Jul 2021 04:01:00 +0000.